I strive to master simple dishes. I don’t aspire to be a person of whom one says, “What an ambitious cook!” or “She should really open her own restaurant!”

No. I want to be someone who can be trusted to prepare a good, well-rounded, home-cooked meal. A meal that has personality, yes, but one that doesn’t try too hard, and relies chiefly on good taste and good technique.

This is why I had long been frustrated by my limited potato roasting skills. Oh, I’d roasted my share of potatoes, but I had never been able to make perfect roasted potatoes, golden and generously crusty on the outside, moist and tender on the inside.

By the time the chunks had developed enough of a crust, the flesh had begun to dry up inside, and I was left with something a bit cardboard-y. Not inedible — it takes considerable effort to render a potato inedible in my book — but not my platonic image of the roasted potato, either.

And then some years ago, my friend Pascale* shared the recipe she uses for pommes de terre rôties, which she learned from her British mother-in-law. I have blind kitchen faith in Pascale — she has never steered me wrong — and I was very excited about her technique, a classic in British cooking that was unknown to me at the time.

Here, let me show you in this video:

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Le goûter is the afternoon snack kids are given when they come out of school around four. In my family, we called it simply le thé, and it was the highlight of the day. Around five on weekends, somebody would invariably ask, “On fait le thé?”

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In addition to planning my menus, I have been doing more and more batch cooking these past few months.

The idea of batch cooking is to block out time one day of the week to prep or cook a bunch of ingredients in advance, which you can draw from and combine for low-effort homemade meals the rest of the week.

It is the shortest path to feeling like a kitchen superhero, saving you brain juice and money along the way.

And today, I am offering you the vegetarian batch cooking plan for fall I’ve created and test-driven with great success: 1 hour of prep work for easy 6 meals on subsequent days.

• Meal #1: Peanut Noodles with Kale and Mushrooms — the noodles of your choice in my deliciously peanutty “magic sauce”, with garlicky sautéed kale and tender mushrooms.
• Meal #2: Fall Buddha Bowl — a plentiful bowl of flavor with bulgur, beet hummus, a raw kale salad, and crispy falafel, topped with roasted peanuts.
• Meal #3: Warming Red Lentil Soup — a warming bowl of soup full of immune-boosting ingredients to keep colds at bay!
• Meal #4: Lemony Bulgur Salad with Feta and Mushrooms — a filling salad of bulgur with tangy feta, marinated mushrooms, and raisins.
• Meal #5: Toad-in-a-Hole Toast with Beet Hummus — a kid-friendly favorite served with beet hummus for dipping.
• Meal #6: Roasted Cauliflower à la Mary Celeste — irresistibly roasted cauliflower in magic sauce! One of my absolute favorite things to eat, period.

Below you will find:
– A shopping list (of which you can get a free printable) — everything is available from the organic store or supermarket (they cost around 55€ ($65) in my Parisian organic store; your mileage may vary),
– Your instructions for the prep work — allow for 1 hour to 1 1/4 hours of prep time,
– Your instructions for each of the six meals — active time ranges from 10 to 15 minutes, time to table from 10 to 45 minutes,
– Suggestions of variations to adapt the plan to various dietary constraints.

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After last week’s events in Paris, it’s not so easy to break the silence here. Writing about news and politics isn’t what I do, and I suspect it’s not what brings you here either, yet I can’t not acknowledge what has happened.

In the wake of these senseless, horrifying acts, which only reinforce the great concerns I have about the world we’re building and the society I live in, I choose to see the silver lining: how French men and women came together in historic numbers in the immediate aftermath, and how much international support has poured in. I am too much of a realist to believe that this tremendous reaction will have any lasting effect on the underlying issues at play, but at least for these few days, (most of) the French get to walk and talk and cry as one, and we can never have too much of that.

These cookies have a rather arresting look, the distinctive, toasty flavor of black sesame, and the delightful texture I look for in all my sablés, delicate and shatter-prone.

Of course I found it impossible to write while all this was unfolding — it suddenly seemed absurd to care about the tiny things I normally care about — but as a friend kindly said to me, writing about food and culture and travel helps bring people of different horizons to understand and respect each other, and that is nothing to sneeze at.

In any case, I thought it fitting to start the year off on a note both dark and sweet with these black sesame sablés. It is a recipe I developed for ELLE à table, a French cooking magazine in which I write a bimonthly column, and sang the luscious, nutty glories of black sesame paste in the holiday issue. This seed butter, made from roasted and ground black sesame, is a dramatic, shiny black and I keep a jar of it in my fridge to slip into all sorts of sweet preparations, or simply spread it on my morning toast of sourdough.

These shortbread cookies have a rather arresting look, the distinctive, toasty flavor of black sesame with a hint of salt, and the delightful texture I look for in all my sablés, delicate and shatter-prone. I understand these qualities won’t do much toward world peace, but if you can share them and make someone’s day sweeter, it’s a step in the right direction.

PS: Black sesame panna cotta, Yves Camdeborde’s perfect sablés, and the galette des rois you have until the end of the month to make, perhaps with your own shortcut puff pastry.

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